“Will We Still Enjoy Pinot Noir?”

Kimberly A. Nicholas grew up on her family’s Cabernet Sauvignon vineyard in Sonoma, California.  Today, though, she’s an associate professor of “sustainability science” at Sweden’s Lund University, from which she advises grape growers and winemakers around the world.

She wrote a 2014 article for Scientific American that was titled “Will We Still Enjoy Pinot Noir?”

It seems that air temperatures are rising in many-wine growing regions, which affects the accumulation of chemical compounds in the grapes and, thereby, changes their flavor.

In an attempt to adapt to increasing temperatures and levels of sunlight, winegrowers are taking a variety of steps, such as reorienting rows of vines and rearranging leaves so as to provide increased shade.  More drastic measures may become necessary in some areas, such as moving a vineyard northwards (in the northern hemisphere) or even uphill.  But this is expensive, and, because of different levels of moisture and differing soil conditions, the original flavors may not be duplicated in a new location.  Moreover, the expertise of a multi-generational wine-growing family, and the inherited culture of a vineyard’s workers, may become irrelevant in a new place.  (Some experts think that French wine is so good — I’m told that it is — because of the hundreds of years of location-specific expertise that have grown up around its production; some feel that California’s still relatively new vineyards and wines are growing better with each generation for just this reason.)

The winegrowers of France, Spain, and Italy, Professor Nicholas suggests, may be facing real difficulties, whereas the south of England is beginning to open up, thanks to warmer temperatures, for wine production.  So, too, with Australia, where Tasmania is beginning to rise while traditional Australian vineyards are struggling a bit.

I’ve always been astonished, by the way, at the minute attention to detail of some wine connoisseurs.  The producers I can understand.  It’s their job, after all, in a very competitive world market.  But I simply can’t imagine devoting much attention to the fine nuances of difference between literally innumerable local varieties and years, worldwide.

One of Dorothy Sayers’s short detective studies describes a wine-tasting competition between her crime-solving hero, Lord Peter Whimsy, and a very competent fake Lord Peter, in which it’s finally the real aristocrat’s exceedingly cultivated wine palette that proves his identity.  I simply don’t pay that kind of attention to the hamburgers and tacos and Thai beef waterfalls that I eat, or to the milk and fruit juices that I drink.  And, frankly, I wouldn’t want to.  There are so many other things to know.

In reading Professor Nicholas’s article, though, and remembering an earlier Scientific American article about current biological threats to world coffee production, I couldn’t help but wonder whether the Lord might be intervening in order to make violations of the Word of Wisdom more difficult to sustain.

(I’d better hasten here, before the expressions of outrage begin to erupt on certain websites, and before some of my usual critics begin, yet again, to lament my looming insanity and/or my Morgbot fanaticism and vengefulness, to assure readers that the paragraph just above was a joke.  A j-o-k-e.)

Posted from Paris, France